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How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

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Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#401
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Also Factorio AFAIK has no good copilot. Sadly the best LLMs are not fine-tuned on Factorio so my productivity takes a massive hit when moving from side projects to Factorio.

Are there any popular games with copilot like AI suggestions being part of the core gameplay?

Also, are there video games with ML-powered opponents or NPCs that'll act more like humans instead of the old-fashioned decision tree AIs? Seems about time. I know there are research projects that tried this for things like Starcraft 2.

Also saw Facebook's experimental Diplomacy AI. Wish that were usable the time we lost a player.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#402
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why anyone wanted to unlock their door with their phone instead of tapping a fob, " I would want to do it with my phone because then I only have to have one thing to carry around with me. I haven't carried a key ring in years. I don't even carry a wallet these days. It's really quite useful. Way fewer trips back to fetch the keys/wallet, etc.

Maybe, but if you really don’t want to carry stuff around then it’s optimal to just type the code in (…which is why it makes zero sense that the keypads suck. except that they were being cheap.)

Then what I'm carrying around is a bunch of codes in my head which is its own form of baggage, or I re-use the codes and that comes with the same risks as reusing passwords has. Using the phone for everything has risks too, but I think not much differently than a password manager does, and most phones I've used have a reasonable device recovery process (not that I've had to use them or have expertise in that area...).

Carrying a single thing (which has a bunch of other uses than just access control) doesn't feel like a burden to me.

That said, I don't disagree at all that the typical keypad for access control on everything pretty much sucks. My front door has like 4 buttons only and does the telephone keyboard thing of using the same button for multiple 'numbers' in your code. Time to jump on amazon to look for a decent front door lock that works with my phone :)

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It starts out as a typical programmer rant these days about AI assistants and LLM fine tuning and then goes on to complain how sadly, they don't work for this game yet. So he's forced to play it manually. How old fashioned. I find that pretty amusing.

Oh well if you thought someone was going to say they dislike LLMs failures so they want fewer LLMs, and instead they say they dislike LLM failures so they want LLMs to be trained more, that's not a garden path. You don't have to back up and re-process the previous words. And in particular a garden path sentence does it grammatically . You suddenly realize you were getting parts of speech wrong.

Note that the original sentence also gave me pause.

It's perhaps too long, overflows the parser stack.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#404
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh well if you thought someone was going to say they dislike LLMs failures so they want fewer LLMs, and instead they say they dislike LLM failures so they want LLMs to be trained more, that's not a garden path. You don't have to back up and re-process the previous words. And in particular a garden path sentence does it grammatically . You suddenly realize you were getting parts of speech wrong.

Note that the original sentence also gave me pause. It's perhaps too long, overflows the parser stack.

By original do you mean Xeronate's sentence? I agree but that's not the comment that was talking about LLMs.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#405
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh well if you thought someone was going to say they dislike LLMs failures so they want fewer LLMs, and instead they say they dislike LLM failures so they want LLMs to be trained more, that's not a garden path. You don't have to back up and re-process the previous words. And in particular a garden path sentence does it grammatically . You suddenly realize you were getting parts of speech wrong.

Note that the original sentence also gave me pause. It's perhaps too long, overflows the parser stack.

Thanks for the feedback if you are talking about me ;). I frequently get suggested to put more punctuation...

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#406
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the original sentence also gave me pause. It's perhaps too long, overflows the parser stack.

Thanks for the feedback if you are talking about me ;). I frequently get suggested to put more punctuation...

Yeah. It was parsable, but took a second reading.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just as easily say, why work on a side project when you could play Factorio instead with the same result? What makes a side project better than Factorio?

I feel I contribute to society more by working on a side project of mine than if I play video games.

Most "side projects" have no users, other than maybe their creator, and therefore provide zero value to society. Furthermore, there's no intrinsic value in "contributing to society" — a term that is completely arbitrary, anyway. If the idea that you can improve society with your projects provides you joy, more power to you, but that's all it should boil down to: doing what you enjoy the most.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m putting all this effort into this game and at the end I won’t really have anything to show for it You will have something to show for it: Joy. If your only interest is to invest effort into producing something that provides some kind of physical value, then of course work will be more interesting than games. Development has fun parts and it has tedious parts. The tedious parts are what usually makes for a good…

You're discounting the joy you get from actually solving a problem for yourself and other people which can provide serious long term satisfaction and monetary rewards. For diversion, I try disconnecting from screens and doing something healthy that involves the use of my physical body. I find walking, hiking, swimming and running very enjoyable. I'm also a big fan of tennis, racquetball and table tennis. I still play…

> You're discounting the joy you get from actually solving a problem for yourself and other people which can provide serious long term satisfaction and monetary rewards.

Key word: can.

You can also waste your time and end up with something no one will use. In fact, that's the likely outcome — there are many repos on Github with 0 stars, after all. Factorio is designed to reward you for your efforts. The real world has no such guarantees.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#409
post #342
post #311

I don't agree with "Factorio is like work". The grind is no different to me than playing Diablo. It feels like a comparison that programmers love to tout because it makes for a memeable and relatable story but at its core it's just like any other gameplay loop.

To me, it starts to feel like work when I have to rebuild large parts of my factory because I didn't leave enough space to expand. This process feels exactly like having to refactor a bad codebase (where you feel the urge to just start from scratch). If you plan your build properly, you can avoid this, but it takes a few runs to learn the best strategies.

I think the new expansion helps a lot with the rebuild issue, since you're expected to have have many different bases on different planets instead of just one big base.

Re: How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me

#410
post #342
post #311

I don't agree with "Factorio is like work". The grind is no different to me than playing Diablo. It feels like a comparison that programmers love to tout because it makes for a memeable and relatable story but at its core it's just like any other gameplay loop.

To me, it starts to feel like work when I have to rebuild large parts of my factory because I didn't leave enough space to expand. This process feels exactly like having to refactor a bad codebase (where you feel the urge to just start from scratch). If you plan your build properly, you can avoid this, but it takes a few runs to learn the best strategies.

You actually don't have to rebuild anything in Factorio. That's your personal decision.
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